[CentOS] yum install to a portable location

Wed Jun 11 16:57:52 UTC 2014
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Dan Hyatt <dhyatt at dsgmail.wustl.edu> wrote:
> I have googled, read the man page, and such.
>
> What I am trying to do is install applications to a NFS mounted drive,
> where the libraries and everything are locally installed on that
> filesystem so that it is portable across servers (I have over 100
> servers which each need specific applications installed via yum and we
> do not want to install 100 copies).
>
> We tried the yum relocate and it was not available on Centos6.4
>
> and
> yum --nogpgcheck localinstall R-3.1.0-5.el6.x86_64
>
> I want the binaries and all dependencies in the application filesystem
> which is remote mounted on all servers.

I don't think there is a generic way of doing this since yum can
pretty much install anything anywhere and run the postinstall scripts
that might only work on the host where it runs.   However, for typical
things it might work to install everything on one host where / is
exported and mounted somewhere on the other systems with PATH and
LD_LIBRARY_PATH tweaked to visit the  bin,sbin,usr/sbin,usr/bin and
equivalent library paths  on the mountpoint after the local locations.
  Things like perl modules will probably become a horrible mess,
though, and other things might need a splattering of symlinks to work.

Might be easier to PXE boot into an NFS-mounted root with DRBL or the
like if you need to save disk space.   On the other hand, it's really
not that hard to tell yum on 100 machines to install the package.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell at gmail.com